Council OKs salary study to help curb personnel losses

Thursday, November 21, 2019

Tired of losing police, fire and other personnel to better-paying municipalities, the Greencastle City Council has commissioned a salary study.

On a split vote, the Council agreed to engage the marketing research firm New Focus to undertake a study of the salaries of six or seven communities. Cities such as Plainfield, Avon, Brownsburg, Crawfordsville, Danville, Bluffton and Angola were listed as possibilities.

After some 30 minutes of discussion at the November meeting, Councilman Steve Fields made the motion to approve the salary study, which Stacie Langdon seconded. Council President Adam Cohen and Dave Murray added affirmative votes. Tyler Wade voted against the measure, while Gary Lemon abstained because he was attending his last meeting (he won’t be available in December for personal reasons) and Mark Hammer was absent.

Wade objected to the expenditure for information he says city officials already know – that city employees are underpaid due to lack of financial resources.

The motion caps the salary study cost at $29,000, which according to the New Focus proposal, would fund an examination of the salaries of 6-10 cities.

“I don’t know that $18,000 or $29,000 or $40,000 (cost levels listed in the New Focus proposal),” Wade said, “gets us any closer to solving the problem, which is we don’t have enough money to be able to do all the things we need to do and pay the people what we should pay them.

“We don’t pay our people well enough,” he added. “We know that we don’t pay our people well enough. We have, at best, an antiquated system of how we do compensation using longevity pay and all these sorts of things that become really complicated.”

Wade said that the suggested $29,000 or $40,000 expenditure could pay for another employee.

“My perspective on it,” he added, “is that we know that it’s a problem. We don’t know where to find the money to fix it, and you talk about the trade-off piece (having to charge residents for certain services). I don’t find it justified to spend the money to look into a problem that already exists.”

However, other councilmen said they needed current data, and Mayor Bill Dory agreed that the City Hall staff does not have time to undertake such a study with its other varied responsibilities.

“The reality is,” Dory said, “we don’t have the staff time to do this ourselves and really spend the time on it that somebody who’s done this and other things can.”

Clerk-Treasurer Lynda Dunbar, who has tried to do salary comparisons via phone and email without much cooperation or success, said New Focus will be “taking a closer look at total costs rather than just salaries.”

Dory said he is unaware of any previous city mayor having such a detailed study done.

“Personally I see two groups of communities we need to take a look at,” Dory said, “one, our competing communities that we lose (people) to, primarily the surrounding ones. And second, communities who are like us in size and resources.”

The mayor noted that longevity pay and when overtime kicks in for police and firefighters doesn’t allow for apples-to-apples salary comparisons.

“Our police department has take-home cars that they are limited to driving in Putnam County,” he noted, “with other departments, it’s carte blanche. They can drive wherever they want. So some of those nuances I think are also important for us to understand. Do we need to make changes in those to align ourselves better with our competition or do we keep some of those nuances similar to what we have now for other reasons perhaps?”

Councilman Cohen said the study will be only the beginning.

“If this comes back as we all suspect,” he said, “we’re going to have to make some very tough decisions.

“We may not be low everywhere,” he said of current employee salaries, “but we need hard data. If it comes back and it says, you know what, you’re on a par with the others, then we’re not going to make a hard decision that’s a mistake.”

He pointed out that in some locales, the park and cemetery departments are combined. Situations like that, he said, aren’t easily addressed without more data than just salaries.

“If we’re low,” Cohen continued, “something is going to have to give in a tough decision way. I want as much hard data in front of me as I can before I either cut a salary, cut a department or something else.”

Clerk-Treasurer Dunbar said it’s not always the department heads whose comparative salaries are cause for concern.

For example, she noted that a probationary Greencastle police officer has a starting salary of $38,579 with no longevity or extras. Meanwhile, the average salary for a new officer in 15 communities similar to Greencastle is $45,123.

“A lot of years,” Dunbar continued, city employees have gotten annual across-the-board raises of $1,000 or $1,200 (including 2020), “whether you’re fighting fires or out digging ditches.”

“I’m not saying any position is any more important than another,” she added, “but there is a different skill level there, and there’s different training involved and the whole thing. That’s what we’re kind of lacking here. Do we pay every employee $1,200 (more) every year or do we need to get them up and then take a look at it every year.”

Councilor Langdon agreed.

“In the past we’ve just given everybody a $1,200 raise or a $1,000 raise,” she said. “Over time that just doesn’t work out for us. I think we have a morale problem in some of our departments, and I would think they would applaud this and cheer us on to go out and find out what we suspect.”

Dunbar said the firm expects to collect the appropriate data within three months of receiving a go-ahead. She said funding could come from any number of current sources, including EDIT, CCI or Riverboat money.

If it starts Dec 1., Mayor Dory said, the firm has proposed an April 1 completion date, which should be in plenty of time for consideration in the 2021 budget.

Joining Council members Cohen, Langdon, Fields, Wade, Lemon and Murray for the hour-long meeting were councilors-elect Veronica Pejril and Cody Eckert.

The Greencastle City Council will next meet in regular session at 7 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 12 at City Hall.

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  • Idiots

    -- Posted by taylortwp on Fri, Nov 22, 2019, at 9:12 PM
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